find a niche and saturate it.
draw the same thing over and over and upload consistently.
also comment on people's profiles, reply, and participate in the community.
Furry is the easiest one to do.
Do some research and find out who's popular at the time and make them gift art that you upload in your gallery.
typically they fave it and it appears on their front page. which gets you free publicity.
another thing, go to convention and do art trades, or purchase a table and sell buttons/prints. (go to walmart and get small prints made. they're 19cents and sell them for $3 or give them away as promotionals)
*cough* porn *cough*
*cough* fetish art *cough*
and most importantly.. dont use deviantart.
you can get more followers on instagram, facebook, and furaffinity than you ever will on DA.
typically if you dont already have a following, getting *anything* on DA is near impossible.
also as an example... you dont need to be good. at all. just participate in the community and comment ON EVERYTHING.
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/falconwolf/
just remember. on EVERY social media platform, each comment you make is a promotion for yourself. and each friend you make is a connection to more people.
fyi, what I would do is choose a platform that has heavy traffic and comment on everything that's been posted in the past 1-3 hours absolutely dilligently for about a few days. like just comment on everything that moves. (I mean within reason. if its a piece you really dont like, dont say you like it. just say something like "wow you did a great job!" etc.) and reply to /everything/. just put your all into it, and later on you can pick through which ones you like and which ones can be valuable customers etc. then you can tone down the media frenzy.
I usually go with quantity first and quality later.
also TAG TAG TAG TAG spam the HECK out of tags. put as many as possible. If you draw a dog sitting and howling at the moon and upload it to furaffinity tag it as "dog" "canine" "canid" "wolf" "sitting" "howling" "moon" "at" "the" "3" "yourusername" "date" "media type" "background type" "colors involved" etc.
if you're on instagram tag it as "art" "artwork" "wolves" "wolf" "dog" "dogs" "3 wolf moon" "moon" "moody" "edgy" etc
remember, tumblr only uses the first 6 tags, so use the first 6 to be searchable, and the rest to be blog specific to find.